The river had developed some riffles and a faint roaring sound warned of a waterfall around the corner. I steered us over to the shore.
Behind us Taylor and Shell were singing “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” When they came into sight I saw that Leonard had put on his black-netted bug hat, like a Victorian lady at a picnic.
“That was such a mind fuck,” said Taylor merrily. “Like, has time stopped? Will this meander ever end? I loved it. What’s up now?”
“We portage here, around the falls,” I said. “Then an easy lift-over into North Tea Lake, where we’ll camp. Take the packs over first then come back for the rest. You might find that carrying the canoe solo is easier, especially if you wear a life preserver to pad your shoulders.”
As I sprang out of our canoe I felt a twinge in my right knee. I better wrap it tonight, I thought. But the body memories were rushing back as I balanced on two slippery rocks, unbuckled the food pack from the thwarts, and swung it up on shore. I could still do this.
* * *
Leonard had blown up his air mattress and was lying on it in his tent, wearing headphones. Shell bent over the fire, squinting against the smoke as she stirred a pot of chicken curry that I had pre-cooked and vacuum-packed. I was planning to make chapatis from scratch too (showing off somewhat).
Taylor had changed into a red corduroy jumpsuit and was drinking an inch of tequila from a tin cup as she shot some video.
“Here we are on majestic North Tea Lake,” she intoned, “land of the silver birch, home of the beaver.” She zoomed in on me while I rummaged in the food pack for a baggie of fresh cilantro. “And this is our fearless leader, Rose McEwan, who is an awesome cook.”
I was in a familiar canoe-trip state—irritable exhaustion combined with mild lower-back pain. I had collected the firewood, helped everyone put up their tents, and cleared a kitchen area beside the fire pit. Taylor was still bounding over the rocks, with a tiara of fireweed in her hair. Her energy was bottomless. Leonard had paced himself well but as soon as the tent was up, he had slipped into it. Karl Ove sat on a log smoking. It had been a long day for everyone.
Our campsite was on a finger of four-billion-year-old rock with tall white pines on the point. The sun was low and the air had a warning chill: Summer was over. On the opposite shore the trees blazed away, a mariachi band of orange and yellows. In July the same shore was a wall of green, almost monotonous. But now we could see the bright differences between pine and maple, poplar and birch. The leaves were becoming more of themselves before they died.
While the curry was heating up I boiled some water and made a cup of black tea. Shell and Taylor were down by the water’s edge, talking in the low purling tones, with bursts of laughter, of women discussing discarded boyfriends. Karl Ove wrote in his notebook. I went over to Leonard’s tent, where the light coming through the blue nylon cast a television pall on his lined, unshaven face. He was lying asleep on the open pages of a book.
“Leonard,” I said gently, “have some tea.”
“This is so kind of you,” he said, brushing at the sides of his mouth. “I’m afraid I’m accustomed to my little pre-show nap.”
“Dinner’s ready when you are.”
Shell was now shooting Taylor, who had changed into a crop top worn over silvery harem pants tucked into my Timberlands.
“Hey girl-squad,” Taylor said to the camera, “you should all get your tushes out of L.A. and join me up here in Canada, in the woods! I am in bear country, see?” She held up the canister of bear spray with its drooling graphic. Shell panned around the campsite, where Leonard was now sitting by the fire, making an I’m not here gesture.
“I’m here with … a few new friends … in an untouched wilderness where you cannot buy things, at all.” A loon let out a faintly ridiculing call, and Shell zoomed out to find it. Taylor continued. “I wish you could all be with me to experience the smell of the … pines, right?” Shell nodded. “And the excellent curry we are about to eat, around a fire made with branches and twigs that we gathered ourselves, actual wood from the woods…” Taylor raised her arm and flexed it. “Also paddling is very good for the triceps.” She turned to Shell. “And, cut.”
“I would love to get a team of synchronized swimmers up here, for a video,” sighed Taylor. “With those crazy nose plugs?”
I dished the curry into our plastic bowls, and for a long moment we all devoured our meals in silence. The chapatis had turned out perfectly—a birch fire burns hot. But my back still hurt.
“Sit here instead,” said Taylor, jumping up to give me her perch against a flat rock. I thanked her and took her spot. Then I reminded myself to slow down, look around, and take it in. The stillness.
Afterward, Karl Ove moved down to the edge of the water to smoke, and Leonard joined him.
“I quit some time ago and promised myself I would start again at the age of eighty,” said Leonard. “I’m heading into year three now,” he said, accepting a light from the Norwegian.
“Ever since I’ve had to travel more,” said Karl Ove, “I find that drinking is no longer helpful. It turns dark too quickly. But the little rituals around smoking cigarettes help keep me sane on the road.”
“I agree,” said Leonard. “It’s like a phone call home.”
Their smoke mingled in the pinkish twilight.
“Will there be music at some point?” Karl Ove asked. “I have this image, of people sitting around a bonfire, playing guitar.…”
“No guitar. But there’s this.” Leonard produced a jaw harp from his pocket, which he began to play. After a few corkscrewing twangs, the loon gave out a long call as if in response. We applauded.
“Let’s sing!” said Taylor. “What shall we sing?”
Silence. Whose material first? Then Leonard began.
Black girl, black girl
Oh don’t lie to me
Tell me where did you sleep last night?
An old Lead Belly song. Taylor answered:
In the pines, in the pines
Where the sun never shines
And I shivered the whole night through.
“Kurt Cobain used to do that one too,” said Karl Ove. He drummed on the bottom of a pot with his fingertips.
“Hey, that sounds good,” said Taylor. “Don’t stop.”
“I used to play drums in high school, when I was in a band.”
As Karl Ove kept time, Leonard and Taylor harmonized. They were like two people on separate islands, the sound of their voices were so different—Leonard’s woolly, frayed, and ocean-deep, Taylor’s like a thin, strong silver wire.
We stayed up for another hour, going through “All Along the Watchtower,” “Red River Valley,” and “Wake Up, Little Susie.” The darkness surrounded us like a great cave as the temperature dropped. We kept moving closer together for warmth and then went shyly off to bed. Taylor and Shell shared a big dome tent—the Princess Pavilion, as it was dubbed—Leonard’s blue one was nearby; and I had pitched Karl Ove’s closer to the point, where the morning sun would strike first.
I led him there with my flashlight, looking back to make sure the red glow of his cigarette was still in sight.
“This is not what I expected at all,” he said quietly, “which is good. Thank you.”
“Sleep well, Karl Ove.” On the way to my tent I switched the flashlight off so I could feel the path under my feet and see the stars growing brighter above us.
* * *
I pushed the dial on my watch to illuminate the face. Almost four a.m. A sound had awakened me, the sound of something sizable bumbling through the trees. Damn. It had been so late when we went to bed that I didn’t go through the rigmarole of hoisting the food pack high up into the trees, to keep it safe from bears. To keep us safe from bears. Instead we stowed the packs under the inverted canoes.
The thrashing continued. Small animals always sound enormous from inside a tent, I reminded myself. And we were in a national park, where raccoons were numer
ous and intrepid.
Who had the bear spray? Taylor, of course.
I quietly unzipped the door of my tent, trying to remember the strategies for bear encounters: For a black bear, you make yourself big and try to scare them off; for a grizzly, you curl up, protect your neck, and play dead. Or was it vice versa? Anyway, there are no grizzlies in Algonquin, and black bears are rare. Except for that one inexplicable attack a few years ago, where a couple were both mauled to death.
A branch snapped. I turned on my flashlight and shone it through the netting of my tent. I heard the hollow sound of a gunwale banging against the rocks and leaped out of the tent with my boot in one hand, ready to hurl it.
“I’m so sorry,” said Karl Ove, raising his arms like a fugitive. “I was looking for the box of matches. I ran out.”
He was wearing underwear, a T-shirt, and gray wool socks. Eric’s socks.
“You scared me,” I said softly. But nobody stirred in the other tents.
“I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep. Once the thoughts begin, the sentences, that’s it and before long I have to have a cigarette.”
“There are some waterproof matches in my tent, in the first-aid kit.”
“You sleep with the first-aid kit?” He smiled.
“Yes, I do,” I said. “In case a wounded bear comes by.”
Karl Ove followed me to my tent, set apart from the others in a stand of jack pines.
“I’m finding the total silence here quite unnerving. We live in the country but there’s always passing cars or dogs, or the sound of the refrigerator.”
I crawled into the tent, felt around in the metal kit for the matches, and handed them out to Karl Ove.
“They coat them with something, so they’re a pain to light.”
He struck one hard on the side of the box. It flared blue and yellow, illuminating his face, its good bones. He lit his cigarette and drew on it deeply.
“You?” he said, tipping the package my way. I shook my head.
“It was a dream that woke me up,” he said, “about my father. I had to write it down.”
His father again. It’s dreadful, how we continue to love our parents regardless of how they treat us. How we keep returning to them, to solve the mystery of who we are. I thought of all the fathers who have turned their sons into writers, compelled to re-create the family on the page. Slowly stacking up the sentences until they resemble a human figure, like a stone inukshuk.
Karl Ove sat at the entrance of my tent and used my flashlight to read from his notebook:
“I was sixteen, and had just come home from spending the evening with a girl in my class whom I longed to kiss, but she was out of my league. I was in an agony of despair by the time I reached home, to find my father drunk, once again. He was either violent or sentimental when he drank, and sometimes sentimental was worse. That night he kept pouring me wine and saying how close we were. ‘You and I are two peas in a pod, Karl Ove, don’t try to deny it.’ Then he asked, ‘Did you have any luck tonight?’ meaning with the girl I had failed to impress. ‘Not so much,’ I said, unsure of the answer he wanted to hear. His face darkened. ‘You don’t have what it takes to get the girls, Karl Ove,’ he said, ‘you’re too soft and sensitive, you need to toughen up.’ I watched him stagger to his feet and come towards me, with his big hand raised. And that’s when I woke up.”
He closed the notebook and put out his cigarette carefully, grinding it into the earth. I could hear someone in the other tents lightly snoring.
“It’s cold out there, Karl Ove.” I unzipped the top of my sleeping bag and he slid in beside me. His face was wet but he turned away, curving his back. I put my arms around him. He murmured something I had to ask him to repeat.
“I still want to please him, and he’s dead.”
* * *
The next afternoon, Karl Ove caught a pickerel, and Taylor made fish tacos. They were out of this world. Is there nothing that girl can’t do? Leonard spent some time drawing little cartoons of us with his Sharpie. Instead of paddling farther down the lake, we had decided to stay at our campsite, where we puttered around most of the day, reading, snoozing. I gave Karl Ove my iPod with some of Leonard’s music. He sat at the water’s edge listening intently. Then he went over to Leonard, who was applying sunscreen to the tops of his ears.
“Leonard, this song of yours, ‘A Thousand Kisses Deep’? It is perfect. It cannot be improved upon,” Karl Ove said to him. “Can I ask how long it took to write it?”
“A thousand years, more or less.” Leonard rasped. “I write very slowly. I write in geological time, where it can take several centuries for things to shift an inch.”
“We are polar opposites then. My new book is already over five hundred pages and the main character is still in utero.” Karl Ove laughed at himself. “My publisher begs me to shut up.”
“Shorter is harder,” I chimed in.
“You’ve been writing too much ad copy,” said Karl Ove genially. “Brilliant as it is.” Catching a fish had cheered him up.
“Short is a good discipline,” I said.
“That’s true,” said Taylor, who was drying the insoles of her sneakers in the sun. “A chorus in a song might be, like, five dumb words that get repeated over and over. But coming up with the right five words can take forever.”
“Can you work on the bus?” Leonard asked her.
“Sure. I like to have life going on around me. Sitting alone in a quiet room just makes me want a chocolate bar.”
After dinner that evening (penne arrabiata with fresh cornbread) everyone had a smoke and we sat around the fire, reluctant to leave one another’s company.
I held up a log. “Are we good for one more?”
“We should probably do the marshmallow thing,” said Shell, yawning.
“Someone should tell a story,” said Taylor. “A ghost story.”
Karl poured some whiskey into his tea.
“Would a murder story do?” I said.
“What’s it about?” Shell asked.
“A dead Canadian painter.”
“But isn’t that your novel?” said Karl Ove.
“It’s not really a novel, it’s just a mystery.”
“Why do you keep doing that?” he said with genuine irritation. “Why do you patronize your own work?”
The others perked up.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“Can’t a commercial, popular work of fiction be a masterpiece as well?”
“You mean, like yours?” I dared.
“I wouldn’t use the word ‘masterpiece.’”
“But you’d call your novels literature. Serious literature.”
“Yes, I would.”
“I agree,” Taylor piped up. “I’m in the middle of Book One right now, and it is rocking my world.”
“Maybe I don’t believe in ‘serious literature’ anymore,” I said, surprising myself. Was that what I thought?
“Or is that just your way of not writing about things that matter?” Karl Ove’s eyes were very dark, almost black, reflecting the dance of the firelight.
“I do write about things that matter. There’s a lot of environmental stuff in The Bludgeoning, for instance. My last book. About coral reefs.”
“Good. But I mean things that matter to you, Rose, personally. The questions or regrets that won’t let you sleep.”
“Is that what you think it takes to write something worthwhile? Just being raw and autobiographical? Exposing the people closest to you to public scrutiny?”
“Of course not. Don’t be so defensive.”
I was stirred up. Why was he attacking me like this? The log I had put on the fire turned out to be too green—the moisture in it began to hiss and pop.
“You know,” I said, “if a woman wrote one of your books, and went on and on about the horror of children’s birthday parties, she would be called a self-indulgent lightweight. But when a man does it, the personal becomes elevated, significant.”
“I agree. But I only have my life, and my experience as a man to write out of.”
Leonard, Shell, and Taylor had all found quiet little activities to focus on while we argued.
“I’m not saying that I couldn’t be a better writer,” said Karl Ove. “I am painfully aware of my shortcomings in that regard. I’m only saying to you that a mystery novel can be as profound as the Bible—if you invest enough belief and meaning in it. If you open yourself up.”
“Like the face of a sunflower.”
He ignored this. I was beginning to feel like Peggy Olson confronting Don Draper in season five of Mad Men. Peggy was a copywriter too.
“A man who writes honestly about his intimate life is considered brave,” I went on, “but when a woman does, it’s called oversharing.”
“Do we have to bring in gender?” said Leonard wearily. “It’s like Israel and Palestine, we’ll be up all night.”
“Easy for you to say,” I said with more bitterness than I intended.
“Tell us more about your novel,” said diplomatic Shell. “You never talk about it.”
“Well, I’m still working out the plot. Pedestrian as that sounds.”
“You see?” said Karl Ove. “You fail to embrace your own material. Although I have little interest in plot myself. Obviously.”
“All right then,” I said, going over to the bottle of Jameson and pouring myself a good slug, “since you asked. It’s called Abra Cadaver.”
In the darkness it was hard to see anyone’s expression. Leonard had on his bug hat, although the evening was too cool for mosquitos. I think he liked its veiled interior. I took a few drags off Karl Ove’s cigarette and kicked the fire into brightness.
“The story begins not far from here,” I began in classic campfire style, “on a lake near Nipissing, where the famous painter Tom Thomson died. Or was murdered. A young medical student, Julia, has convinced her boyfriend Martin to go on a canoe trip to the spot where Thomson was last seen, before his death in 1917. There are many theories about what happened to him. But Julia thinks she has the answer.”
“An answer to the mystery,” said Karl Ove.
Don't I Know You? Page 21